With nearly 200 service locations and over 20,000 employees, Spectrum Health is Western Michigan’s biggest not-for-profit organization and one of the largest hospital operators in the state. As such, it carries responsibility not only for the welfare of the communities it serves but the security and effective delivery of petabytes worth of sensitive medical information as well.

Sean Hankel, the director of infrastructure for Spectrum, hopped into SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at HP’s recently concluded Discover conference to provide a glimpse into what it takes to safeguard the privacy of millions of patients amid the tectonic technological shifts disrupting the healthcare industry today.  A razor-sharp focus on data security is the prerequisite, he said.

“The things we have to consider every time we have to look at any app that may have one hook, or in a lot of cases not even have a hook, into an EMR… We still have to examine that as crucially as any other application, because if at some point we’ll need to open that up, expose it to the outside for any kind of task we’d be opening ourselves up to a tremendous amount of risk.”

The caution and deliberation characteristic to regulated industries such as the healthcare sector contribute to an atmosphere where it’s much harder to adopt new technologies than in less strictly regulated markets, but Hankel said that Spectrum is nonetheless making an effort to keep up. It’s already dabbling in the public cloud, he highlighted, with a number of pilot instances set up to provide file sharing services for some of its least scrutinized business units.

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The role of cloud in secure healthcare services

Cloud services have taken up an especially important role for healthcare providers such as Spectrum in the wake of the passing of the HITECH Act, which mandates that organizations covered under the regulation must demonstrate “meaningful use” of their infrastructure to be eligible for government payments. And as if that wasn’t sufficient incentive,  firms that fail to meet the provisions of the legislation by 2015 could face penalties.

Meaningful Use is one of the four categories under which new technology initiatives are filed at Spectrum, Hankel said, with the others being IT-only, care-related and strategic growth-focused. There are presently about 1,600 projects in the queue, roughly 200 of which have already been cleared by the leadership team and allocated funding.

It would have been impossible for his team to handle that tremendous load just a few years ago, Hankel reflected, but he said that the situation has changed now that Spectrum has embraced a more robust operational methodology across its software development and infrastructure teams. That change of mindset is already starting to pay dividends.

“Agile has entered fast and furious into our environment, we’re even trying to explore that on the infrastructure side with roll-outs and migrating data centers and things like that, we have the architects turn towards that methodology. And we re-organized teams around Agile, giving them their own space,” Hankel  detailed.

In conjunction with revamping how it manages and develops applications, Spectrum is also working to modernize its data center infrastructure, which includes some 3,000 servers – about 80 percent of which are virtualized – and 2,000 databases running on top. According to Hankel, the provider is currently in the processing of migrating its most mission-critical installments from its aging deployment of HP’s proprietary Unix distro to commodity x86 machines equipped with speedy flash drives.

As part of that upgrade, Spectrum has also divided its once mostly homogeneous storage environment based on tiers so that each level includes technology from a different vendor. Yet it continues to depend on HP’s XP line of virtualized storage systems for Tier 1 storage, the high-performance backbone of its core systems. Hankel explained that his company has no reason to switch, seeing that it has not experienced a single outage since becoming a user of the series several decades ago. “That’s what we love about that platform: we can throw everything at it, and that’s it, it’s steady,” he highlighted.

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